The Black Narcissus

Why am I so put off by the idea of watching Angelina Jolie play Maria Callas in Pablo Larrain’s new ‘sumptuous’ bio-pic, Maria?

It’s strange, because I find Jolie mesmerizing. She strikes me as being a genuine weirdo – which I totally relate to : a unique actress – who else could have played the psycho-slippery female version of Cuckoo’s -Nest-Jack Nicholson in ‘Girl, Interrupted’, for which she won the Oscar for best supporting actress? This was a character whose IQ was so through the roof she essentially no longer knew how to exist. It was over-acting – if you want to look at it that way – but the ingestible craziness ate the screen. She was incredible in Gia, where she played a drug-addicted model. I like her in action films like Salt, and especially in the hyper-violent Wanted, which she nailed. She was very good in Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, even if the spotlight was stolen from her rather ruinously by her own lipstick (in a sepia film, yes her lips are to die for I realize, and I do love red lipstick – but mamma mia, ‘Chanel, sorry Guerlain Rouge A Levres’ should have been credited as the co-star). Her directing, in my opinion, is underrated – both Unbreakable, about Japanese atrocities in World War II, and First They Killed My Father, about the horrors committed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, were solid, earnest, affecting, if occasionally heavy-handed films, even if her disastrous self-directed ‘divorce drama’ starring her very self and her ex-husband and now sworn enemy, Brad Pitt was literally unwatchable (when Brad starts ‘speaking French’……..my goodness…… )

I also respect and like Chilean director Pablo Larrain. Maria is the third film in his trilogy of Famous But Rather Troubled Twentieth Century Women – my subtitle, not his – the others being Jackie, where the divine Natalie Portman did a pretty good job of inhabiting the supposedly icy Onassis in the post Kennedy shooting era – the blood-soaked shirt was unforgettable, but the fact that I liked it didn’t surprise me; as most Black Narcissi know rather too well, I am now, and will forever, be obsessed with Ms Portman because of her role as Nina Sayers in the magnificent Black Swan, my piece on which is probably the most emotional and torrid you will ever get from me. I can’t see a picture of her now, even in some standardized pink Dior poster, without getting a micro-pang in the heart and stomach.

What surprised me far more was how much I loved Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana in the second part of the trilogy, ‘Spencer’. I find that Kristen’s overly-self-conscious lip-biting and general twitchery to denote ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ can sometimes work against her – she was atrocious in David Cronenberg’s Crimes Of The Future, like an AI android programmed to act like Kristen Stewart (or perhaps that was the entire point, and I missed it?). I thought the nervous energy she always brings to the table was just right in Personal Shopper, a ghost story about a fashion assistant flitting between London and Paris and a film I adore; and though I didn’t believe for a second that she was Jean Seberg, she looked so utterly beautiful in that film with her blonde crop and cut off tops – and it was so well crafted as a whole- that I didn’t remotely care.

But Princess Di? I suppose we Brits have a thing about others doing bad posh English accents. Some have still not got over Dick Van Dyke’s cockney in Mary Poppins – though it’s now obviously a one of a kind classic (and me and D often sing it at karaoke).. And Keanu Reeves in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, whose astonishingly absymal mauling of an upper class English voice is indescribable……………… comes full circle, in the end, and suits the high campery of the entire proceedings (oh my god, Lucy writhing in the garden…..) Eventually you wouldn’t want it any other way. In general, though, perhaps because I am an English teacher, I am overly sensitive to these things. A bad accent usually means a bad film for me. Some can nail it perfectly; Emma Stone can for sure; she was Britisher than British in Poor Things and The Favourite; I think Julianne Moore is pretty good; I love Nicole Kidman but I often think there is an Australian undertone to whatever accent she is trying out, whether American or British – her lurching into proper Aussie in the otherwise brilliant Portrait Of A Lady by Jane Campion really took you out of the action in what was otherwise an exquisitely overwrought film; one moment you thought you were in eighteenth century London, then you suddenly found yourself in Crocodile Dundee. Gillian Anderson can obviously do both because she is both British and American – although D walked in one day while I was watching The Crown – a series I thought was superlative in the extreme but which he couldn’t abide – we do have our differences; I can do more mainstream than he can – and he stood open mouthed, flabbergasted by the horrendousness of Anderson’s wheezing, sidewalking hairsprayed crustacean impression ofThatcher which had us both collapsing into hysterics (and for which she obviously won a lot of prestigious awards…I am usually out of sync with what ‘Academies’ etc considers to be good acting). The opposite is obviously also true with American accents, of course. You can’t take the Hermione out of Emma Watson. Michael Caine has never even tried. My hairs stand on end every time I see a Brit – particularly Daniel Craig – who I like otherwise attempt to do a classic Southern Drawl – but you know better than me so do tell me otherwise..

Anyway. I couldn’t for a second imagine Kristen Stewart, she who was so perfect as a moody, and very American teenager in the Twilight Series, madly in love with a blood-addicted but deliberately appetite suppressing vampire Robert Pattison – becoming British royalty. And my mother’s shackles were definitely raised to cushion-chewing levels one night, brother and father gone to bed, as we turned down the lights, opened up another bottle of red, while my sister, D and I settled down on the sofa one evening to watch the Diana bio-pic at my parent’s house. I love cinematic debates – it fascinates me how easily opinions differ, even with close friends whose taste is so often similar to yours; my friend Peter and I often sit agog at the other’s praises and dismissals; He liked The House Of Gucci; D and I both thought it was beyond dreadful – Gaga’s accent, porca miseria, D even slunk off to bed rather than continue the sufferance of watching it – which is quite an extreme blip of politeness for him but I suppose his taste membranes had just been too ingloriously busted; I myself eventually got into some of the bald-headed gilded ridiculousness of it all by the end (but really, just give the Sopranos or Godfather). Strangely, M3GAN, the camp as Christmas horror movie – my entire favourite of last year, but which Peter didn’t especially adhere to, whereas I saw it twice in the cinema – was an 80% family success; it thoroughly hooked in my dad, who loved the intricacies of the narrative and immediately declared he wanted to see it again; my brother, who was roaring thumping the armchair in approval several times, and my sister, who was shrieking in uninhibited delight with me and D all cackling in delirium and who later declared she was going to order a Megan poster for her house the next day. (Mum thought it was stupid, which it kind of is.)

But I digress! A few tassles were chewed during ‘Spencer’, and I think she reached its conclusion – but I can’t be sure. D, my sister Deborah, and I were somewhat transported by it, though. Stewart nailed the essence. The whole was so fragile and beautiful. The score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood made it even better. And what I love about Larrain’s films is the subversion of the usual ultrapredictable character arc: the overexposition and beginning, the problem to be resolved and then the conclusion, all the principles of basic screenwriting which in truth have never interested me past about the age of three. I don’t NEED that. I just want to be SUSPENDED in something, to lose myself in a different time and place. And boy were we suspended. I could feel the physical and emotional coldness of The Palace as they all ‘holidayed’ up in Scotland, freezing Diana out. She felt convincingly, and tragically, alone. She captured that. You were in the mid-beginnings of her downward spiral. ‘Atmospheric’ doesn’t begin to hint at how full the film is with re-memorable period ambience- to me every detail, perfect; even the slightly off kilter fish eye lens of a South American director putting his own spin on things so classically British made it all feel slightly odd; renewed, and therefore more real, when so many period dramas, to me, just feel like a trip to the taxidermist’s. When Diana just can’t take any more of the stuffiness of The Firm, and recklessly drives her two young sons to a fast food restaurant to a backdrop of Mike And The Mechanics’ All I Need Is A Miracle – I was in heaven; it was so heartlifting and beautiful, despite the awful tragedy you know is going to happen not so far into the future…..

Yes, Larrain likes his tragic divas and socialites. All of whom had fine taste in scent, by the way. Jackie liked the sophisticatedly dirty – Bal A Versailles, Jicky; Joy, 1000 – I love the idea of her crêping past the crowds coolly and defiantly in the original Patou 1000 extrait – so alluring, so dignified, so superb in every respect; Krigler Patchouli – apparently a very straight up but deep New York patchouli I have never experienced but can imagine being adeptly prickly yet warm; and Jil Sander 4, a rich, spicy, early nineties number when she wanted to funk things up; on the days she wanted to be more aerated and floral, she allegedly wore Fleurissimo, but so, probably, did Queen Nefertiti, seeing that the house of Creed was launched roughly around the year 1365 BC.

Diana, true to the demure image she gave off – I forgot to say, sorry Kristen, you were great, but have you seen Australian Elizabeth Debicki as Diana in the last series of the Crown? She was taller than Di was – ok, shave her shins off! – but the acting, the accent, my god, how could someone do it THAT perfectly? – her whole dememenour was off the charts jaw-droppingly good, in a way that you felt you were actually watching Diana, rather than an impressionistic ‘capturing’; no, I was saying , sorry, re Diana’s butter wouldn’t melt initial aura, that she also went intentionally for the publically demure in her scenting, favouring Penhaligons’ Bluebell for daywear, which Thatcher also wore, presumably plagiarizing the-then-queen-to-be’s scent in an attempt to give her a whiff of humanity; she also wore Houbigant’s Quelque Fleurs, which is a pretty little number, and for warmer moments Hermès Faubourg 24, which my mum wears and gets complimented on, as well as the devastatingly lovely Van Cleef & Arpels’s First – her actual signature.

Perfume-wise, Callas went somewhere in between, classic and sophisticated, but favouring the rose/jasmine/sandalwood safe comfort zone of Chanel No 5 – can’t go wrong with that – and the cooler, but similar- Detchema De Revillon (ditto). Intriguingly, she is also said to have used Luchino Visconti’s favourite perfume, Hammam Bouquet, quite a dirty, androgynously powder pressed – a definite hint of perspiration – rose, iris and sandalwood perfume; it has its angelic aspects, but the fact that it was based on the Turkish Baths at Jermyn Street tells us quite a lot about its probable, far more sensual, origins. Maria Callas, once her eyesight was failing, would apparently leave Hammam-Drenched handkerchiefs on the stage, in the precise places she needed to be during that night’s opera, led to her arias by her perfume.

I am presuming that both Pablo Larrain, and Angelina Jolie, have tried dousing up the props and the curtains with Hammam Bouquet to give some veritas to the proceedings of Maria ; the trailers I have seen leave me deeply stiffening and cringeing (as do the pictures I have put up above; to me she just feels instinctively, disastrously not the girl.) I just can’t place Callas and Jolie together, at all. But at the same time, I am not Pablo Larrain, who is an aesthetic virtuoso, and I do like to be proven wrong; the first two films took a little getting used to before I could try to sink into their luxuriant textures, so perhaps this one will do too – if I don’t choke to death in horror on my popcorn; part of me is definitely intrigued by how all of this indulgence and majesticity pans out on screen (things take longer to get on Netflix and in cinemas than they do wherever you are) so I would love to hear your personal insights on any of the points shared above if you have already seen it and to hear that I am mistaken. Is it good? Is it terrible? Just middling? What’s your take? If you are not a cinephile, then let’s talk about the divas’ scents instead, or insights into their lives. But if any of you were in raptures watching ‘Maria’ and recommend it in any shape or form – even the apartments in Paris, etc, the mood, because I can be easily swayed by convincing and instinctual, not prissy – and particularly CGI – production design – we saw Gladiator II at the cinema on my birthday and it was as persuasive as a giant set of lego; like Angelina Jolie, who was apparently terrified to the core of taking on a singing role, and this part specificially, but took it anyway because of her fear, I just might take the plunge.

I had a good lookaround in Tokyo yesterday.

One thing I (re) realized : much as I would love to meet up again with some of the lovely perfumisti and perfumiste I have got to know over the years and can imagine us communing post-armathon, back-of-handathon and wristathon and sample-sprayed cards bursting meaninglessly out of shoved in books over vino in some beautiful ancient charmery in Cannes, Milano or Firenze, the reality is that I am just too neurodivergente to possibly deal with all the chemical overwhelm.

I have become very olfactive-sensitive to pierce the-duodenum blood/metallic screech : I could have vomited smelling the Beaufort range of scents in Nose Shop Shinjuku, which to me make nails across the blackboard feel like a gentle manicure – these perfumes are my nemesis. There are plenty of that type around of course; people like them. Fair play if you do. For me personally, though, these EDs (endocrine disrupters – probably true for the majority of perfumes, let’s be honest), are nothing short of sprayable horror stories.

Thankfully, less desperate to be conceptual brands do still exist (in the old days the inspiration for the creation was usually just ‘let’s make an irresistible smelling perfume’) and I was pleased to realize how many longstanding ‘alternative’ brands still exist. I didn’t see any L’Artisan Parfumeur anywhere – are they ok ?- but all the usual suspects, from the Malles to The Different Company to Nicolai to Ella K – to Orchestre de Parfums to Unum to Bond No9, and many others were still going strong, some after decades; I found it gratifying that despite the constant tsunamis of new brands being birthed every day – often, in my view, just out of sheer greed and not real artistry (discuss): Giants like Le Labo, Diptyque, Creed, Byredo and Mariela Replca are all HUGE in Japan right now —-no, it was pleasing to me that even the less sledge-hammeresque niche houses are also now so entrenched in the public’s perfumed consciousness that they can continue not only to exist, but to also make good scent.

The fruity gourmand has obviously been done to death, but there is something about Dea Bendata – or Blessed Goddess – that speaks Seasonal Cheer. With all the spiced oranginess in the initial burst of Nepalese Timur pepper, pomegranate, green grape and Turkish rose; the warm balsams of the base ; the sense of fullness – not wretched spindles of corrosive irondust ladled callously over poisonous ozoned fake woods for the ponderous beard-clutching Hipster — make this perfume – like an Italian mulled wine and panettone, full of vivacity and good humour with a great deal of twinkle in its eye -rather appealing. In spiteful times, we sometimes need such generosity.

Well this is certainly a provocatively named perfume to come across on a Shinjuku afternoon – especially at this time of the year.

At first I assumed the name was pure sensationalism – and nothing wrong with that when there is so much extortionate ennui piled up on the shelves you have to get your pretentious customers’ attention somehow – but it turns out that the genesis for this what in many quarters would be considered completely blasphemous perfume – musty, dusty – and definitely somewhat lusty (but also, it must be said, a a little bit fusty) was a Danish performance piece from the patchouli-drenched unwashed musked decades during which the artist paraded stark naked in anti capitalist protest through the Copenhagen stock exchange) and cheers to that: Christ himself would hate our current systems which are inherently anti-Christian – just think about it for a moment: possibly the actual Anti-Christ has just been elected the next President Of America).

Does the perfume itself live up to the Sex Pistols level shockery of the title ? (I can still remember my puce-faced apoplectic grandfather when the group appeared on Top Of The Pops singing Anarchy In The UK : I was a terrified and very confused seven or eight year old cowering in the backdrop (but slightly excited)).

I agree with the brand, though – who might consider a grammatical editor – that the scent has integrity. It feels warm, whole.

Yes, whoever said it the other day was right. Frederic Malle’s brilliantly named ( and smelling ) Synthetic Jungle has been changed to Synthetic Nature. Just seen the bottle in Isetan

What aesthetics-devoid PC fuckery is this ? What leach of any poetry / poeticism / common sense ?

Who could ‘Synthetic Jungle’ have possibly been offending ?

The lemurs? The python?

A piece I wrote for Electimuss on Puritas because I love it. This is now my favourite perfume on d- a gorgeous, airy frankincense with perfect sillage.

https://www.electimuss.com/blogs/news/frankincense-the-sacred-essence

It has been a turbulent year. Most of my close friends have had extreme stress – deaths in the family, work issues, relationship strife, health problems, house disasters- and that’s before you even start thinking about the violent flux that has been the world, which no one in their right mind could consider calm or stable. The Year Of The Dragon was certainly energetic, Jesus – but it was more than many of us could handle. I myself have had a rather tumultuous time, not on an even keel, very up and down – my sudden announcement in the early summer that I needed to be off work for my knee troubles never mind the students and their exam success was considered blasphemy in my organization, with my roiling up the schedules and student prognostica in boulders of rocketing magma thrown with abandonment like Donald Trump: oh impulsive Sagittarius, can’t you think things through more?; I acquiesced, agreed to have surgery later, but the seas have never quite become as calm or waveless as I would have liked in the time since (bring on the Christmas and New Year Holiday…I just need to be outside of a super organized and obedient Japanese administrative structure for a few minutes.)

In the annals of human history, I wonder how 2024 will be rated by the scholars. War, Regime change, drastic political lurchings, freak weather systems, but no one has the energy to think about ‘the environment’ any more with everything else going on even though that is all we really have…. (a Netflix documentary on the waste that Amazon and other greedy megaliths cause on a daily basis almost pushed me over the edge when I was bombarded with all the commercial Christmas crap yesterday in Yokohama station…..all these things that we just don’t need….it actually brought on a headache.) But, like everyone else, I am just dragged along on the inevitable tide; this is the stupid society we have chosen, the way of life that is deemed to be normal, and there’s nothing I can do personally about it so let’s just crack open another beer.

This has definitely been a transitional year. I have been tempestuous – the global atmosphere itself so full of upheavals and strife that even if all were perfect in my life it would be impossible to find real serenity in any case, never inured or cut off from my surroundings as some people choose to be , but there have definitely been positives in 2024 that I am very grateful for. In some ways this has been a year of (re)connection. Me and D are super happy. So many nice experiences together. My family and I, after a difficult period, are back on track and I really look forward to seeing them again in the spring back in the UK if we can. Yes, there have been some bust ups with friends here in Japan when I have gone off the boil because my nervous system is sometimes so overwhelmed with all the various stimuli that I can’t quite nail social interactions. But real friends are real friends and we smooth out the wrinkles and keep going (thanks Melanie, Yoichi and Yukichi and others).

Another excellent development in the last academic yearhas been my relationship with my Japanese colleagues in the English department. For seven years, I was cast out into a wilderness of isolation because of my inability to connect with another foreign teacher that joined the company with whom I shared mutual toxicity, bizarre because I liked him in many ways and he me, but the other’s presence made our hairs stand on end and hearts beat fast in absolute phobic rejection of each other to the extent that in the end it was agreed by the powers that be we couldn’t be in the same building (he once told me that often, when I entered the room, the coldness of my eyes spread through the room like poisonous ice fog and gave everyone the chills; an observation I have never quite recovered from (I wrote about this rather vividly in my strange piece on The Caucasian in Japan, Replicants if you fancy indulging in yet more psychodrama). The upshot of all this, anyway -sorry Mandy Aftel, I always end up dragging myself too much into perfume reviews, don’t I? What a narcissist! Who cares about your work dynamic, the readers exasperate, just tell us about the mthfckng perfume..). All in good time, children, all in good time-

no, the disastrous result of all this co-worker neurosis for me personally was that because it was agreed by the kamisamatachi gods upstairs be that we couldn’t possibly work together any more, I ended up not working with the English teachers, but rather only with the very foreigner-shy maths and science teachers, or the even more elusive Japanese language and Social Studies teachers, with whom I barely exchanged a word : often just a heavy lidded closed off Edvard Munch character in a unpeopled, miserable vista.

Then, o jubilation – the other ultrasensitive person in question mercifully left at the end of last year- suddenly, to everyone’s amazement, I could have sworn he was going to stay for life with his ho ho ho Santa ‘gregariousness’ – and though I genuinely wish him well, I can’t deny that his departure hasn’t helped enormously in my day to day interactions. Now that I mainly work with the English teachers, as well as the odd friendly biology and economics teacher who I get along perfectly well with, I can actually relax in the teachers’ room : I finally feel like part of a team. We all like each other. There is never any aggro, unpleasantness, sarcasm, personality clashes – it is always calm and genteel. One new teacher who joined in the spring ostentatiously loves tea, and is often brewing this or that high end blend and pouring it out in paper cups for everyone, something I find rather charming, so the other day I decided on an impulse to give him some of my favourite tea on earth, Vietnamese tra sen -or lotus – a floral green tea I first tried in a very beautiful and dreamy situation in Hanoi and whose flavour and smell I still adore.

I wrote about this blissful drink in my Hypnosis of Lotus piece; I find the taste and aroma of tra sen to be both relaxing and mentally clarifying at the same time – it is also very enjoyable heavily diluted in a big 2L bottle of water and refrigerated and taken out for the day in hot summer weather – just so fragrant. Familiar, yet not, it smells a little like jasmine tea, but both more tangy and with gentle balsamic and vanillic undertones in the base. The tea connoisseur inhaled it from the packet and exhaled happily – he seemed delighted to have added it to his collection of upscale tea leaves he keeps in his desk draw and I imagine that the lotus will be doing the rounds in the teacher’s room when I go into the school tomorrow afternoon.

I have never smelled lotus oil, and especially not blue lotus oil, which sounds impossibly exotic but which is what natural perfume queen Mandy Aftel uses as the main opening accord of her new perfume Sacré Bleu. A quick online check tells me that the essence extracted from Egyptian blue lotus flowers is deeply calming, hypnotic – and apparently induces ‘lucid dreaming’. The dried and crushed flowers can also be smoked, like a joint (‘intoxicating’, ‘even hallucinatory’ according to some accounts), and Portia of Perfume Posse’s perfect review can tell you more about the olfactory development of this perfume in note by more detail – I can’t better it.

I will admit I found the composition initially confounding: what is this? D couldn’t quite get his head round it either. It was only when I honed in on the lotus in the opening and made the direct connection with the tea I know so well, the scent it emanates from the canister in concentration, that I could really smell the lotus if you know what I mean; with the florality of boronia there is also a definite black grape aroma, a fruity tang that then ingeniously melts into a really beautiful aged Mysore sandalwood essence melded over black tea: strangely addictive. This final accord in Sacre Bleu is the kind of real, deep rooted santal you want clinging to your winter cardigan as you potter about peacefully contemplating （or not, just trying to live in the moment,) I find it very comforting, especially in the superior extrait de parfum, where the sandalwood comes even more to the fore, as you knew it would. This feels grounding – but also opening. I will save my samples for days at home over the new year break, when I hope to take even more stock of things and work out ways to live more healthily next year. Another of the positives from 2024 has been the e-bike that the d got me in the summer; oh the liberation, how wonderful Kamakura has come back in reach again rather than the stuffy crush of suburban bus routes: the beauty of cycling down past Hachimangu Shrine on a sunny December morning with its now empty lotus pond, which in the height of summer will be full to the brim with lotus flowers opening on the surface of the water to the accompaniment of splashing koi carp, and herons.

But to open the question to the readership floor …

Has 2024 been fulfilling/relaxing for you personally, or have you also been tossed about like a tumble dried sock in the chaotic cyclone that is human existence?

If so, how do you regain your inner composure ? What is your personal lotus? What takes you to a more tranquil, serener space……?

As the cold approaches predictably I am drawn towards thick sweet perfumes that take off the edge. Funnily though, the most ambered perfume I bought this year (I ended up going back to the Indonesian shop on Arab Street in Singapore and bought three bottles – it was $6 after all and I should have got more but it was the last day and the suitcase was heaving) – which I wore, really blissfully – my favourite entire perfume experience this year ? ironically, on several sweltering equatorial evenings in August. Many perfumistas swear by heavy ambres in hot weather – perverse and antituitive, when we know you are supposed to wear citric/ aqueous watercolours, but the hardcore sisters like to sweat those perfumes out note by note layer by layer, feel the animal.

I do too, on occasion, think fuck it and wear Bal A Versailles Cologne on dirty skin on a warm day and reap the benefits. Usually, though, I much prefer an unspontaneous shower a couple hours before going out, lying on a bed – in this case our strange corner side room hanging right over a busy Singaporean thoroughfare – and letting that scent really sink into me as I know it is going to bloom later : if there is a category of scent that works on me it is amber, quite Shalimarissime.

I almost missed this one. Almost everything on the shop round the corner from the central mosque was oudh; some with unexpected textures and nuances I could have lingered over but we were boiling and needed lunch : quickly I sprayed on the only one that seemed non masculine / agar and kept walking.

Soon I was getting headspinning flashbacks to the original Obsession – the first formulation of which was…. well I can’t quite find the words for how I felt about it. Quietly deranging maybe: morbidly sensual, I wanted to plunge my powdered teeth into women when they got into a taxi; some Moschino ! – ie a tad sickly – the cheap top notes are a tad plastic banana – perhaps a drop of Must De Cartier; at any rate, this business is a real slow burner that takes its own sweet time to reveal its delicious labdanum – which stays for a day or two on the body – some rubbed off on the cat again the other day – sorry, Mori !but for three or four days she smelled sublime.

It only hit me recently what this actually smells of. Nag Champa incense, which I love. That powdered floral wist that hangs in room corners and softens hard emotions. In winter, or in summer, you sometimes need such heartwarming balm.